L’Ile Noire by HergéCasterman, 1984 (originally 1956)

I never read any of the Tintin books as a kid, so this was my first excursion into the world of Tintin et Milou, Dupond et Dupont, and the various bad guys Tintin and Milou manage to outsmart. Reading in French is very slow going for me, lots of pausing to consult my dictionary or wordreference.com. Comics themselves are so foreign to me, too, that it took some time for me to start properly “reading” the pictures: at first, I kept missing crucial/funny details (like the fact that when Tintin escapes from Dupond et Dupont early in the book, he handcuffs them together). I read this over a period of a few weeks, a few pages at a time: so I’m not sure it was the full experience of immersion in excitement/danger/adventure that I’d have reading a Tintin book in English. Pleasing anyway.